Theo van Gogh

Minister Kasja Ollongren of Home Affairs must reconsider her decision not to give a journalist access to tapped conversations around the murder of Theo van Gogh and the Hofstad group, the group to which Van Gogh's murderer Mohammed B. belonged, the Council of State ruled on Wednesday. According to the court, the Minister's explanation for why these conversations can not be released was not sufficiently substantiated.

Mohammed B., currently serving a life sentence in the high security prison in Vught for the 2004 murder of Theo van Gogh, barricaded himself in the prison's kitchen on Wednesday and trashed it. He was angry because he found out that two men who carried out a terrorist attack on a mosque in Enschede last year were placed in the same prison wing as two Muslim women, NOS reports.

In an interview with German TV channel ARD, PVV leader Geert Wilders claimed that populist politician and LPF leader Pim Fortuyn was murdered by a Muslim extremist in 2012. This is not true. Fortuyn was killed by environmental activist Volkert van der G. On Twitter Wilders acknowledged that he misspoke, saying he was talking about Theo van Gogh's murder in 2004.

"Pim Fortuyn was addressing the problems that I am addressing now. Unfortunately he was killed and murdered by a radical Muslim", Wilders said in the interview, which was recorded on February 9th.

There are no concrete indications that Mohammed B., the man serving a life sentence for the 2004 murder of Theo van Gogh, had any accomplices in the murder, according to the CTIVD, the commission supervising the intelligence and security services.

The Netherlands is not at “war” with Islamist extremists, Prime Minister Mark Rutte said on Sunday. He disagrees with PVV leader Geert Wilders assertion that the entire Muslim world has declared war on the west, he said during television show Buitenhof.

The widow of Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor and caricaturist of satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, compares her husband's death to the murder of the Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh. Charbonnier was killed in the Charlie Hebdo shootings on January 7th.

As many as 174 of the 475 mosques in the Netherlands were attacked by vandals over the last ten years, according to University ox Amsterdam researcher Ineke van der Valk. The statistic is dramatically different from the 1980s and 1990s, when you could count the number of abusive attacks on one hand, she told the Volkskrant.

Geert Wilders has been under protection for 10 years. "Broadly speaking, the threat remained at the same level in recent years, but the difference is that it now comes more from abroad than from inland", the PVV leader says.

Public prosecutor Frits van Straelen says he is convinced that Mohammed Bouyeri "did not act alone" in killing film maker Theo van Gogh on 2 November 2004. In the television program Dossier EenVandaag, Van Straelen says that the case into Van Gogh's murder "produced frustratingly little."

Theo van Gogh fans will be able to see all 13 films he made at Amsterdam's EYE Film Museum from the 10th of October onwards. In this retrospective, some of the more negative thinking about the filmmaker, known for his criticism of Islam, is hoped to be dispelled and replaced with respect for Van Gogh's passion as film maker and film lover.

The round-up of some of this week’s most noteworthy events and news stories features the storm on 'pakjesavond', an "innocent" kiss that put Onno Hoes in the spotlight, KLM's ongoing fight to reach an agreement with its union, and new threats against "pig" Wilders.

Researchers from the Israeli/American Security and Intelligence Company (ITRR) intercepted a new threat on an internet forum for Jihadists, directed toward PVV-leader Geert Wilders. The message is a call to murder Wilders in an attack with explosives.